This article was published in the Financial Express in Bangladesh.
“Science as a
Contact Sport; inside the battle to save Earth's climate” by
Stephen Schneider is an illuminating book by a world renowned climate
scientist and professor at the Woods Institute for the Environment at
Stanford University. In 2007, Schneider received the Nobel Peace
Price on behalf of the International Panel for Climate Change (IPCC),
along with Al Gore. His book is a recounting of his efforts over
three decades to get the US government and the rest of the world to
pay attention to climate change science.
The basic question
which climate science has tried to answer is: how serious is climate
change? But communicating a scientific answer to this question has
been impossible, Schneider says, as politicians, journalists and the
average person on the street does not understand that scientific
predictions and models of climate change can only predict
probabilities of particular outcomes. Unfortunately, the public and
the politicians have shown little desire to understand the
significance of these scientific probabilities. Instead, they are
generally interested in climate science only the extent that it
supports their own pre-conceived political beliefs that climate
change is insignificant.
If the above sounds
familiar, a particular example for which Schneider presents some
numbers should frighten all of us. For low-lying
countries like Bangladesh, one of the critical questions of climate
change is how high sea level rise will be. The answer to this
actually depends on whether or not the Greenland ice cap melts; this
event would release enough water to raise global sea levels about 25
metres (about 80 feet). This would be the end for Bangladesh, sinking
perhaps 75% of the country. It would also be the end of most of the
world’s coastal cities like New York, Los Angeles, Washington DC
and London. Here are Schneider’s estimates of how likely this is:
“For Greenland
to irreversibly melt, my own [estimate] would be roughly a 2 to 5
percent chance that it is already too late and it will happen over
the long run. At 1 degree Celsius more warming, I’d raise the odds
to 25 percent..." (page 274)
So this is the
problem of climate science in a nutshell; the likelihood of a major
catastrophe like 25 meter sea level rise could be theoretically be as
low as 2 to 5 percent. So in the US, Republican politicians like
George W. Bush as well as numerous Democrats whose political
campaigns rely on donations from oil and coal companies will always
focus on the 2 percent probability and dismiss climate change a waste
of time. However, for those of us who have not been paid off and can
think for ourselves, the rest of the sentence should be shocking:
"...and at 2
degrees Celsius to 60 percent, at 3 degrees Celsius to 90 percent,
and so on.” (page 274 continued).
Critically, the
basis for all international climate negotiations is to limit global
warming to 2 degrees Celsius (as most governments in the world have
already decided that it would be too expensive to do anything more
than that). This international consensus means that 2 degrees of
warming is inevitable, as everyone has accepted that it will happen
and will not even try to prevent it. Given that fact, Schneider’s
odds for a 25 metre sea level rise and the destruction of Bangladesh
becomes 60% to 90% (the 90% figure is still relevant, as it is always
possible for countries to fail to cut carbon dioxide emissions enough
to limit global warming to 2 degrees).
What to do now? The
only people who care about Bangladesh and have the capacity to change
anything are Bangladeshis living in Western countries. If they really
care about Bangladesh, they should all become climate activists and
pressure their governments to do something to prevent this. People in
Bangladesh have only two options; firstly, invest vastly more in
education and hope people can emigrate before the country sinks.
Secondly, invest vastly more in birth control, targeting a 22nd
century population of only the 25 million people, which would be the
maximum number that the country could support if it was reduced to
pockets of high land in Rajshahi division and Chittagong Hill Tracts.
Unfortunately, Professor Schneider died from cancer in 2010, and now
there is one fewer climate scientist to tell us how we can save
ourselves from catastrophic global warming.
